Someone commented but deleted on how they felt laptop CPUs have gotten worse in recent years, using the example of their U series cpu being slower than a much older M series cpu. Since I wrote the comment, posting it here:

The U series are "low power CPUs". They can do a lot more than they could in the past, but the H series are the actual successors to the M series. It's why the 10980HK is still the top performing of Intel's CPUs in a lot of workloads (quite significantly in some cases, we're talking 60% reductions in compile times for large C++ projects, like Chrome): https://youtu.be/pdO4u87UCYI?t=346 , and for that workload even an older 9300H handily wins against their current efficiency flagship in the 1185G7.

You are trading off a lot of power for improvements in power efficiency.